At first glance, these three books appear to merit little
consideration as a group except for their focus on women's writing
in America. Aside from sharing the obvious characteristics of gender and
nationality, the writers discussed create their body of work within the
elaborated language and social structures of mature industrialism. But
when we move beyond those very general characteristics, certain
significant but less apparent similarities appear which unite the books.
The most important of these arises from the challenge that all issue to
received critical categories such as definitions of genre, conventional
judgments of literary value, or "mainstream" male plots and
patterns of characterization that ignore women's experience. The
three critics show writing women from different places and times in
America facing adversarial or indifferent social structures and
addressing male communities of literary discourse closed to them.

Mary Papke's Verging on the Abyss examines the careers of two
women, Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton, who are now firmly enthroned in
all but reactionary American "major author" lists. Both women,
whose careers are examined chronologically, are white, upper-class women
of the literary period designated as American realism. As Papke presents
their work, Chopin and Wharton place their individual female
protagonists in conflict with their social order. Papke characterizes
these fictional women, caught between individual desires and social
duty, as "verging on the abyss" where culturally transmitted
categories of meaning hold less coercive power. Chopin's and
Wharton's female characters "search for states of liminality
in which they might achieve, however momentarily, autonomy" (p. 6).

The Chopin section offers a valuable addition to the critical body
of work on the Louisiana writer, uniting her earlier short stories with
The Awakening by presentation of the protagonists' liminality. The
strongest section of the book, however, is Papke's re-examination
of Wharton's critically maligned later books, The Glimpses of the
Moon (1922), The Mother's Recompense (1925), and Twilight Sleep (1927) as well as such fragments as "Beatrice Palmato" (1935)
and The Buccaneers (1938). Here the critic neatly balances the demands
of the social order, particularly the family, and the requirements of
individual self-expression. Even in earlier works such as The Custom of
the Country (1913), Wharton does not reject the demands of family on the
woman's life; rather she protests the total irrelevance of women
and their traditional social roles to the male financial competition
that Wharton considers to be at the center of American society. A
quotation from French Ways and Their Meanings (1919) shows
Wharton's opinion of the desired balance between individual desire
and traditional social roles in a "grown-up" civilization:

Marriage in France, is regarded as founded for the family and not
for the husband and wife. It is not designed to make two people
individually happy for a longer or shorter time, but to secure their
permanent well-being as associates in the foundation of a home and the
procreation of a family. Such an arrangement must needs be based on what
is most permanent in human states of feeling, and least dependent on the
accidents of beauty, youth, and novelty. (p. 128)

Because Wharton's book proposes the French as the "most
human of the human race," and because France became her beloved
second home, we may assume that this quotation describes the
author's social opinion - despite her own marital difficulties (p.
101). As Papke understands, Wharton throughout her career insisted that
American women have no real influence on society because their
activities hold no interest for the money-making male leadership (French
Ways, pp. 107-108). Despite numerous independent public undertakings,
they therefore remain in "an infant class" as in the
Montessori educational system which strives for the "development of
the child's individuality, unrestricted by the traditional nursery
discipline ..." (French Ways, p. 102). Papke's argument adds
to the body of Wharton criticism, much of which concentrates on
individual passion and self-assertion without placing them in a social
context. By balancing those opposing forces in Wharton's later
work, she comes closer to the social vision so explicitly set forth in
Wharton's often overlooked occasional piece.

Even though the book offers a sensitive discussion of the two
authors' work, the argument is at times somewhat diffuse,
especially when Papke retreats to her metaphor as explanation. Her
analysis of the individual works often outstrips the clarity of her
synthesis. In addition, she accepts traditional critical judgments of
genre and literary value too uncritically. For example, she deems
Chopin's work to be separate from and superior to both local-color
fiction and the sentimental novel without adequate acknowledgement that
these categories often serve to ignore women's fiction centered on
regional culture and on emotional bonds between family and friends.
Moreover, these classifications have often been available to categorize
and dismiss women's writing as a whole, with one or two
"brilliant exceptions." Although such observations as the
following are commonplace, they bear repetition: whereas earlier critics
repeatedly grouped Sarah Orne Jewett and Kate Chopin, among other women
writers, as local-color writers and thus minor artists, Robert Penn
Warren and Allen Tate, say, did not suffer this literary diminution.

In her conclusion, Papke joins the latter two critics as she
reminds us that "we must at last speak the unspeakable to each
other and thus transform abysses of solitude into an uprising of
individual response and collective responsibility" (p. 178).
Suzanne Clark picks up this theme as she instructs us in the ways that
some of those chasms have become more difficult to bridge in recent
literary history.

Clark's Sentimental Modernism states that modernism, seemingly
a gender-neutral concept, was, in fact, a construction of a largely male
critical establishment which defined itself, often explicitly, by its
difference from the language, plots, and intent of women's writing.
Built upon a base of psychological, intellectual, and aesthetic theories
propounded, for the most part, by men, this construct devalues the
depictions of emotion and connection which occupy so central a place in
much woman's literature, both early and contemporary. Clark pithily observes, "The horror of the sentimental helped to define the good
male poet as the prostitute defined the good woman" (p. 10).

To advance her argument, Clark discusses the work of women writers
who, with one exception, have too seldom received serious critical
attention: anarchist Emma Goldman, poets Edna St. Vincent Millay and
Louise Bogan, avant-garde author Kay Boyle, contemporary essayists and
novelists Annie Dillard and Alice Walker. Indeed, Goldman's work as
lecturer and essayist seldom merits literary discussion because of its
"political" nature. Clark's inclusion of Goldman serves
to remind us how effectively modernist criticism has retreated to
aesthetic discussions from political argument and emotional appeal.
Clark insists that this is indeed a modern trend as she places
Goldman's work within the American literary tradition of resistance
which includes Emerson and Thoreau.

To the work of all these women, so disparate in sensibility and
background, Clark brings an alternate set of critical judgments. She
argues that conviction and emotion are motivating forces as significant
for literature as those of intellec and linguistic innovation, that a
desire to change the reader's life may be a more
"serious" enterprise than the wish to engage the
audience's intellect or admiration. In the tradition of
woman's domestic fiction, Clark forthrightly announces her
intention to engage us, to instruct us, and, yes, to inspire us toward
change. She seeks "to restore the sentimental to modernist literary
history - with all its banality and also all its connection to
subversion and ethical appeal" (p. 15). Clark demonstrates how
seemingly unrelated intellectual developments, for example, the work of
New Critics such as John Crowe Ransom, the theories of Sigmund Freud,
and more recently the works of cultural criticism such as Ann
Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture, ignore or
trivialize women's experience and literary practice.

Modernism initiates a "reversal of values" which
celebrated momentary individual self-assertion over the traditional
communal structures. In Clark's view, this literary movement exalts
erotic fulfillment over companionship, affection, and partnership and
favors avant-garde techniques over conventional language. Moreover,
Clark contends that the movement toward aestheticism, experimentation,
and intellectuality of modernism, in effect, relegates literature to the
status of a mere leisure activity confined to the easy chair or, at its
most serious, to the carrel. In contrast, Suzanne Clark, like Jane
Tompkins in Sensational Designs, believes that the written word as women
have practiced it intends to have consequence in the workaday world.

Elizabeth Jane Harrison's Female Pastoral details the various
attempts by Southern women to reclaim their native landscape through a
reworking of the traditional pastoral mode. This revitalized pastoral
places women's histories and connections at the fore of the
regional literature. Harrison illustrates her thesis by discussing works
produced by writers customarily placed within the popular craft
tradition alongside those produced by writers of self-conscious art:
Ellen Glasgow, Margaret Mitchell, Willa Cather, Harriette Arnow, Alice
Walker, and Sherley Williams.

Harrison persuasively argues that these women, led by that female
Janus of Southern literature, Ellen Glasgow, form a new and parallel
regional tradition. Building on the thought of cultural critics of the
South such as Lewis Simpson, critics of women's literature such as
Nina Baym and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and critics of
African-American literature such as Barbara Christian and Jean Yellin,
Harrison describes a pastoral which shows the woman shaping a fertile,
rather than an exhausted, landscape. The productive pastoral setting -
farm, plantation, or rural home - as reclaimed by woman's care
replaces the commemorative churchyard or the abandoned mansion as symbol
for domesticated Southern nature. In contrast to the fallen Eden of
their male contemporaries - the lost Southern "garden of the
patriarch" as Lewis Simpson perceptively describes it - these
authors, in Harrison's view, insist that this energized pastoral
community is exemplary rather than nostalgic. The authors presented here
eschew the search for the lost patriarch and his devastated kingdom
which drives the writing of many male writers of the Southern
Renaissance - William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, John Crowe Ransom, and
Robert Penn Warren, to name a few notable examples.

In her conclusion, Harrison states that the pastoral impulse is no
longer a vital one in the writing of white Southern women in contrast to
their African-American contemporaries. Although it is true that Bobbie
Ann Mason, among others, depicts an encroaching urban society, other
contemporary white Southern women, Ann Patchett, for one, in her novel
The Patron Saint of Liars (1992), continue to use the pastoral as
Harrison broadly defines it. The female pastoral envisions an ideal
community that balances individual self-realization with communal
duties; I would therefore expect that this plot in all its rich
variations will continue to enrich American literature.

Do these critics point to an area of agreement through the
variables of race, region, and genre to find a shared woman's
literary practice? Clearly such female pastorals as Sarah Orne
Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs and Charlotte Perkins
Gilman's Herland written by Northerners parallel the plot that
Harrison draws. Region is therefore not the only relevant variable, yet
due consideration indicates that the pastoral appears more often in the
writing of Southern women. Race as well cannot be seen as the central
driving force behind this communal plot as both Harrison and Clark
demonstrate through their blending of works by white and
African-American women.

A significant difference of opinion on literature's function
within society between the writing men and women in modern America
emerges clearly. Surely it is no coincidence that the male leadership of
the Southern Renaissance discussed by Harrison overlapped those at the
front of the New Criticism discussed by Clark (John Crowe Ransom, Allen
Tate, and Robert Penn Warren, most notably). Both strains seek to
reclaim the idealized social authority of the past for the male critic
within the context of a rationalized modern American social order. These
men write from a profound sense of displacement, a loss of privilege
experienced by their class, their profession, and their gender.
Therefore, we should not be surprised to find them engaged in a flight
to the text from a ruined present they find bleak and a patriarchal past
they consider heroic. In contrast, the women discussed immerse
themselves in the emotional connections of the present and in the
visionary possibilities for the future - nostalgia holds no charms for
such women writers as Emma Goldman or Alice Walker or Kate Chopin.

Throughout the discussion I have paired the critical works of
Suzanne Clark and Elizabeth Harrison. The reconciliation of those two
critical sensibilities can be found in their portrayal of the engaged
relationship of individual and social order - Mary Papke's work
also focuses on this aspect in her discussion of Wharton's later
work. Moreover, all three show many of the female protagonists immersing
themselves in the natural world. The literary characters find themselves
working in cooperation with rather than seeking domination over the
landscape; as Annette Kolodny has shown, the male and female literary
approaches to American nature have been radically different. The critics
demand that the claims of both individual and group be given their due
in fiction, but more than that, they depict these women and their female
creations meeting society and the natural world with passionate
engagement; the objectifying, judging male gaze finds no place in the
writing they discuss - not even in the writing of those women so close
to the center of American literary and social spheres as Edith Wharton,
Ellen Glasgow, and Kay Boyle. Literature in the works covered by these
critics intends to implicate the audience and to move it to change.

The intention to address and to include the range of readership
unites both these critics and the women they discuss. Both Clark and
Harrison agree that the writing of the authors they examine intends to
be inclusive, but more, they believe that criticism itself should refuse
the attitude that it is the academic's own posted preserve. In
keeping with that belief, both refuse to use race, genre, popular
appeal, and language level to declare certain experiences as
categorically unworthy of serious critical consideration. They integrate
the work of African-American women into their discussions as a matter of
course, judiciously balancing the claims of racial and gender experience
and histories. Harrison and Clark use language accessible to the general
reader as well as the literary specialist; the tricked-up lingo that so
effectively dates literary criticism is, for the most part, blessedly
absent in these books. Because the two critics intentionally break down
divisive categories, they model in their own work the intent of the
writing they discuss. The critical categories and language themselves
suggest the emergence of a more inclusive and cooperative literary
community.

In the last account, the critics treated in this discussion agree
that a vital, significant literature originates from the vision and
emotions of one human being, the author, meeting those of the other, the
reader, and weaving the ties of an affecting, and "effecting,"
relationship.

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